At this year’s Miss USA Pageant, it won’t just be Miss Michigan USA Krista Ferguson’s first time competing on the Miss USA stage—it will also be the first time a contestant has visibly worn a glucose monitor for type 1 diabetes during competition. Ferguson’s monitor, a patch called Dexcom, will be visible on her arm all night long as she vies for the title.

But when Ferguson, 24, first won Miss Michigan USA, she wasn’t sure whether she’d wear her monitor somewhere visible or not. (She can wear the patch on her arm, thigh, or stomach, or even take it off for a few hours if she feels confident about her blood sugar levels.) Recently she did a Snapchat takeover on the Miss USA account and documented how she checks her blood sugar each day. “I had a lot of people messaging me if I would be wearing [my monitor] onstage,” Ferguson tells Glamour. “I thought, I don’t want to make anybody feel pity for me, but this is my platform. I have accepted it and learned that I can make a difference and have an impact on young women and men.” And that made the decision easy: “If I were to take it off, it’s almost a little bit hypocritical. Why would I hide something like that? I’m keeping it on—with pride.”

Ferguson was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2015, at age 22, a late diagnosis for this type, which is often identified in late childhood or early adolescence. “I actually went to the hospital for something completely different—a ruptured ovarian cyst—but they took my blood sugar and found out it was 400,” Ferguson explains, a very high reading. “At first I was in shock. [My diabetes] had been untreated for so long—I could have gone into a diabetic coma.” Then, she says, she realized that years of unexplained symptoms—extreme thirst (“I was drinking 15, 16 water bottles per day”), an overactive bladder, tingling in her toes, blurry vision, exhaustion—could be attributed to her diabetes. Even though it was a relief that these symptoms could now be managed with insulin injections, she still says she struggled to come to terms with her diagnosis. “When I got diagnosed, a part of me didn’t want to compete in pageants anymore,” says Ferguson, who first vied for the title of Miss Michigan in 2014, before her diagnosis. “I thought: I’m never going to win. They’re going to see me and think, She’s sick.” So she took a year off. During that time, she says, “I eventually told myself: I’m going to have diabetes, but my circumstance and my illness do not define me. I pushed myself. I reminded myself: I want this.” She returned to the competition in 2016, finishing as first runner-up, which only fueled her resolve to win. She returned in 2017 and took the title. “I really understand my disease now, so type 1 diabetes was my platform. I’m very positive about it,” explains Ferguson, who works with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund (JDRF) as her chosen philanthropy, an organization working to end juvenile diabetes.

These days Ferguson says she lives a pretty regular life. She’s made a few minor dietary changes—“I still have dessert, but things with protein like milkshakes and cheesecake work better for my body”—always aims to hit her 10,000 steps since staying active helps her body regulate her blood sugar, and checks her blood sugar levels regularly on her phone via an app that syncs up to her Dexcom monitor. When she takes the stage Sunday night, she hopes young people everywhere living with type 1 diabetes feel empowered by seeing her wearing her Dexcom. “Whether I win or lose, if those kids can see that pageant girls can have diabetes and still compete—that is winning.”